Records and approvals — Zoe

Zoe works directly in the systems your organization has connected — ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zoho Desk, Microsoft 365 and others. Reading is immediate. Changing anything is not: every write is drafted first and executed only after a person approves it.

Looking things up

Ask in plain language and name the record where you can.

Show me the incidents assigned to me, highest priority first.
What is the status of CASE-2291 and who owns it?
List the changes scheduled for this weekend.

Read-only lookups run while you watch. Zoe shows the steps it is taking as it works, and collapses them to a single line when it finishes. When Zoe reads one specific record, a side panel opens with a read-only preview of that record — status, priority, assignee, last update — so you can check the details without leaving the conversation. Open in ServiceNow (or the equivalent for the source system) takes you to the record itself.

Creating and updating records

Describe the change the way you would ask a colleague: raise a P3 incident for the meeting room projector, assign it to the AV queue, or set INC0012345 to In Progress and add a note that we are waiting on the vendor.

Zoe does not make the change. It prepares it, and an Approval required card appears in the conversation.

The approval card

The card carries everything you need to decide:

A shield icon and the heading Approval required, with the target system named on the right.
A one-line summary of what is about to happen, in plain language.
A change table listing each field Zoe intends to write. Where a value already exists you see the old value struck through, an arrow, and the new value.
An expiry — Expires in 24 hours. An untouched draft lapses rather than sitting live indefinitely.
Approve and Reject.

Read the change table, not just the summary. It is the exact set of fields that will be written.

Select Approve and the card shows Executing…, then Completed once the system confirms. Select Reject and it shows Rejected; nothing is sent. If the target system refuses the change, the card reads Failed — nothing was changed, so a failed approval never leaves a record half-updated. If the window lapses first the card reads Expired — ask Zoe to prepare the change again.

Approval cards are part of the conversation. Close the tab, reopen the conversation tomorrow, and a still-pending card is there waiting.

What Zoe will not do without approval

Any write to a connected system goes through this gate: creating a ticket or case, changing a field, adding a customer-visible reply, closing a record, sending mail or a message. This holds on every channel — the web app, the mobile app, phone calls, and scheduled workflows — so there is no route into your systems that skips the card.

Some changes are deliberately not approvable by voice. On a call Zoe tells you this change can't be approved by voice under your organization's policy and leaves the card for you to approve on screen.

A named agent can be given automatic write access by an administrator; personal agents you create yourself can never write automatically. When a change was proposed by an agent Zoe consulted, the card says so.

Where the result shows up

After you approve, look in four places:

The card itself — Completed, Rejected, Failed or Expired.
The preview panel — while a change is pending, the affected fields are highlighted with Pending changes — awaiting approval; after execution the panel refreshes to the new values.
Your snapshot and queue — the Awaiting your approval tile counts drafts waiting on you, and the queue view reflects records once they change.
The source system — the record in ServiceNow, Salesforce or Zoho Desk is the system of record, and that is where the change lands.

Administrators can review every decision afterwards in the audit trail; if you are an administrator, the Explain panel shows the same evidence one reply at a time.

Which systems you can read and write depends on your organization's plan and on which connectors an administrator has set up.